Events

Speaker Series

Visions of Wallingford: Neighborhood Learning Through Collaborative Filmmaking

Date: Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2024
Time: 12-1 p.m.
Location: 205 Lockwood Library, National AI Institute for Exceptional Education 

Talk Abstract: Addressing the planet’s most urgent socio-ecological challenges requires coordination across individuals, institutions, the built environment, and the natural world. This kind of coordination is complex and involves learning at different scales of practice. In this  presentation I describe my dissertation work, which seeks to better understand learning at the scale of the neighborhood, through a collaborative filmmaking project. Residents of a predominantly white, densifying Seattle neighborhood led a series of local walking tours, filmed these tours, and assembled the footage into a documentary film. By theorizing civic learning as a semiotic process, I examine how discourses related to neighborhood and community life inform participants’ modes of expression; and how these modes of expression are laminated into modes of relation over the course of the study. Findings show that discourses of care, accessibility, and groundedness emerge and transform through participants’ ongoing place-storying and infrastructuring efforts. From this analysis, I suggest implications for planners, education researchers, and others interested in creating civic media and designing civic learning environments.

About the Speaker

Ari Hock.

Ari Hock, PhD, is a postdoc in the Institute for Learning Sciences. He studies learning "in the wild"—in public spaces, neighborhoods and cities. Ari is interested in how communities coalesce and align their work through collaboration, conflict and storytelling to address large, societal challenges.

Moving Through Uncertainty: Ensemble, choreography resources for sensemaking and learning

Date: Friday, Dec. 6, 2024
Time: 12-1 p.m.
Location: 205 Lockwood Library, National AI Institute for Exceptional Education 

Talk Abstract: This talk centers how embodied theories of learning, informed by the artistic practices of dancers, can reframe what is learned in STEAM spaces and how it can be learned (and analyzed). In particular, this talk looks at how choreographic-based, expansive views of embodied learning can reframe uncertainty as a common feeling in science learning that is often used to discount participation and instead can be generative for ensemble thinking and learning. Across two primary studies, Vogelstein demonstrates how incorporating ensemble-based, choreographic practices into STEM learning environments can expand learners' sensemaking resources (e.g., movement proposals and responses) and support learning by both youth and adult researchers alike. Choreographic inquiry practices offer new ways to support embodied STEM learning that center equitable forms of ensemble participation while broadening the domain-specific conceptual terrain in ways that are generative for the Learning Sciences.

About the Speaker

Lauren Volgelstein.

Lauren Vogelstein, PhD, is a visiting assistant professor of dance education in the Department of Arts and Humanities at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research focuses on designing and studying STEAM learning environments where the A in STEAM is as respected as the STEM disciplines involved. In particular, Dr. Vogelstein explores how collaborating with dancers and choreographers on the design and analysis of STEAM spaces can leverage artistic and choreographic research as rigorous forms of collective learning. Her interests at the intersection of STEM and dance were nurtured at Fordham University and the Alvin Ailey School, where she earned her BS in mathematics and BFA in dance with a concentration in choreography. She went on to earn her MA in learning sciences from Northwestern University and her PhD in learning and design from Vanderbilt University. She recently completed postdoctoral fellowships at NYU and the University of Pennsylvania, working on NSF-funded projects focused on the study of equitable and expressive computing learning environments. In addition, she currently serves as a Co-PI on the NSF-funded AISL project, Choreographing Science ($858,997, Award #2115773). Her research has been published in the Journal of the Learning Sciences and ZDM Mathematics Education.